[ecrea] Call ICA preconference - "Data and the Future of Critical Social Research”

Call for the ICA 2017 Pre-Conference "Data and the Future of Critical 
Social Research”

Sponsored by the Philosophy, Theory and Critique Division of the 
International Communication Association

Event date: 25 May 2017, 9:00 AM - 5 PM, San Diego, California, USA

Deadline for proposals: January 15th, 2017 (500 words abstract)

Organisers: Nick Couldry (London School of Economics) and Andreas Hepp 
(University of Bremen)

What we call media and mediated communication is more and more 
interwoven with processes of datafication in an environment of 
continuous and largely automated data-gathering, for example, from our 
activities online or our mobile phone use. The uses of data collected, 
aggregated and analysed by systems of computers are today a precondition 
for everyday life. In short, data are changing social ontology, and as a 
result the role of ‘media’ within the constitution of the social. This 
can be understood as  part of a process of ‘deep’ mediatization (Couldry 
and Hepp 2016) – in which the very elements and building-blocks from 
which social is constructed are based in processes of mediation, 
accompanied by automated data processing.

In this transformed context, this pre-conference asks: What do such 
changes mean for critical communications and social research – indeed 
for critical social theory and informed political action generally? How 
should we now do critical empirical research into media and 
communications bearing this deep mediatization in mind? The 
pre-conference aims both to focus these questions theoretically and to 
encourage perspectives on what constitutes critical empirical research 
under such conditions.

Questions on which we welcome either theoretical or empirical 
contributions include:

• What sort of economic, political and social order is being built 
through today’s data relations and their underlying linked infrastructures?

• How are the self’s relations to institutional power changing through 
digital traces, data relations and with implications for autonomy and 
freedom?

• How is the nature of social institutions changing through deep 
mediatization and the pervasiveness of data relations?

• Are practices of civic and political intervention for social change on 
balance stimulated or undermined in a datafied environment?

• What does community and other forms of collectivity come to mean under 
these new datafied conditions?

• How should we develop our methods for a critical analysis of processes 
of deep mediatization?

• What kind of social interventions are needed that build from critical 
analyses of datafication ?


Please email a 500 words proposals to Andreas Hepp 
((andreas.hepp /at/ uni-bremen.de)) by January 15th, 2017. Please direct any 
questions to: Nick Couldry ((n.couldry /at/ lse.ac.uk)) or Andreas Hepp 
((andreas.hepp /at/ uni-bremen.de)).


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